THE CREATIVE MIND: Chipping Away the Blarney; Ireland Lauds a Novelist Who Dismantles National Myths

By ALAN RIDING

Published: September 22, 1999

DUBLIN, Sept. 15—
Time moves swiftly in Ireland these days. Five years ago Roddy Doyle caused an uproar with a hard-hitting television series called ''Family'' that portrayed domestic violence and alcoholism among the Irish working classes. ''Even my old teachers' union complained that I had a teacher striking a child,'' he recalled. ''But I'm fairly convinced that if 'Family' were broadcast tonight, it wouldn't cause half the fuss that it did in 1994.''

The proof may be Mr. Doyle's acclaimed new novel, ''A Star Called Henry'' (Viking). In it he has done no less than dismantle some of the founding myths of 20th-century Irish nationalism. And so far he has heard nothing but praise for it here.

''I did expect at least one person to stand up and object,'' he said softly. ''But there seems to be a self-confidence that wasn't there in the past. A lot of the old statues have come tumbling down.''

Mr. Doyle, 41, has now knocked down a few more, not least that Ireland was actually a better place after its war of independence against Britain led to creation of the Irish Free State in 1921. Yet in the newly prosperous Ireland of the 1990's such a notion is no longer treasonable. Money, rather than memory, is the new Irish obsession. And with the present breaking free at last from the past, history is now available to become raw material for Mr. Doyle's fiction.

The novel, described as Volume I of a trilogy called ''The Last Roundup,'' follows Henry Smart's first-person account from his birth in a Dublin slum in 1901 to an alcoholic mother and a one-legged bouncer-cum-murderer father, until 1921. His early years are miserable as he lives on the streets with his younger brother. As a teen-ager he joins the Citizen Army and helps seize the General Post Office during the abortive 1916 Easter Rising. The rebel leader Michael Collins then has him bumping off traitors and training young revolutionaries. But when the war ends, Henry feels betrayed by the Irishmen who have seized power. His own life now threatened, he leaves Dublin for Liverpool.

For Mr. Doyle, who cuts a distinctive figure with his shaven head, wire-rimmed glasses and pierced left ear lobe, the book marks a dramatic change from his narrative close-ups of the past. He made his name in the 1980's with his Barrytown trilogy -- ''The Commitments,'' ''The Snapper'' and ''The Van'' -- affectionate and humorous looks at working-class life in a Dublin suburb that were all made into movies.

His next novel, ''Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha,'' which won Britain's Booker Prize in 1993, is a 10-year-old boy's account of his parents' crumbling marriage. Two years later, in ''The Woman Who Walked Into Doors,'' the narrator tells of her struggle to rebuild her life after a violent marriage.

Now, variously inspired by Charles Dickens, Peter Carey, Gunter Grass and Salman Rushdie, Mr. Doyle is reaching out to embrace a nation's history through the best part of a century. If things go according to plan, the second volume of ''The Last Roundup'' will follow Henry Smart to the United States to live the Irish immigrant experience, while the third installment will return him to a different Ireland.

''Gradually, in the writing and the planning, the big history began to become real and big to me,'' Mr. Doyle said in an interview. ''At first I saw Henry as a bit of a liar, chancing his arm through the 20th century, claiming he'd done things and seen things. But when I started describing his childhood, the lying element became less important. Although it's not exactly realistic, I felt that essentially Henry is telling the truth.''

And yet, like that of many of his generation, Mr. Doyle's knowledge of Irish history was anything but reliable. At primary school, he recalled, the distinction between legendary and mythical figures like St. Patrick and ''the real lads who came later'' was blurred. When the ''troubles'' began in Northern Ireland in the 1970's, with Mr. Doyle now in a high school run by the Christian Brothers, the passions of the war of independence returned, with the Irish Republican Army again the heroes. ''Then the heirs to the idealism of 1916 started planting bombs in restaurants and pubs in Belfast,'' he said, ''and suddenly history disappeared.''

So he had to do his own digging. At the end of ''A Star Called Henry'' Mr. Doyle lists a score or more books whose authors he thanks for ''the information, ideas, images, phrases, maps, photographs and song lyrics'' that helped him in his writing, not only in understanding the early Republican movement and its assorted socialist and nationalist factions and in portraying figures like Collins, James Connolly, Padraic Pearse and Eamon de Valera, but also in getting a feel for slum life in Dublin at the turn of the century.

One book in particular, ''Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History'' by Kevin C. Kearns, proved invaluable. From it Mr. Doyle learned that many working-class women were known as ''shawlies,'' for the shawls they wore. He discovered that rat catchers would make a ''soup'' of baby rats that they rubbed on their arms to bring rats rushing out of their hiding places.